Directed by Tarsem. Starring Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Catinca Untaru, Daniel Caltagirone. Club, IFI, Dublin, 117 min
YOU DON'T encounter something like this every day. The Fall, a curiosity of the highest order, comes across a little like The Princess Bride reimagined by the sort of pop-video impresario who uses only one name.
Sure enough, it turns out that that the film, "presented" by David Fincher and Spike Jonze, was made by somebody called Tarsem. The director, who devised the video for REM's Losing My Religion and several high-profile commercials, shot the picture over four years in a truly mind-boggling number of exotic locations. At one stage, we set down in Prague just long enough for one character to jump off the Charles Bridge. Featuring further brief stops in Cape Town, Bali, Argentina and another 30 beauty spots, The Fall is one of the most visually arresting pictures you will see this year.
But is it any good? Well, it's certainly not short of ideas. The Fall (which, sadly, features no appearances from Mark E Smith) concerns itself with a recuperating stunt man in 1920s Hollywood. Having damaged his legs during the making of a western, Roy Walker (Lee Pace) lies in hospital yearning for morphine and dreaming of his estranged girlfriend.
To distract himself from his troubles, Roy begins telling Alexandria (the spooky Catinca Untaru), a young Romanian girl, the fantastic tale of five disparate heroes - among them a pirate, a bandit and young Charles Darwin - and their battles with the evil Governor Odius. As Roy's mood deepens, the story, which we see through Alexandria's imaginings, becomes ever more violent and ever less hopeful.
Tarsem, whose previous feature, The Cell, was something of a catastrophe, does have something to say about the nature of cinema, the magic of stories and the perils of romance. But the film is mainly concerned with more obscure, less existential questions. What does a swimming elephant look like when viewed from below? How do you make a butterfly morph into an island? Aren't ziggurats cool? That sort of thing.
In short, The Fall is a mad folly made by an overgrown teenager with too much money (through not as much as he'd like). Still, as such things go, it kinda, like, rocks. Pharmaceutically enhanced students will have a ball.
